Quote:
Originally Posted by acottawa
Yeah, it was one of those false economies. Following the BRT was supposed to save money, but so much has needed reconstruction (or will need it in the near future) that a new route probably would have been cheaper.
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Given the cost escalations we've seen, both in Ottawa and elsewhere in Ontario, there's almost zero chance that any new route would have been cheaper. Where else would they have have had a surface corridor? Anything other than repurposing the Transitway and using highway medians would require tunnelling or elevation for grade separation which would have been (and would still be) massively more expensive. Even back then the tunneled portions (with stations) were averaging something like $250M/km with most surface construction running at $80-100M/km. Today, the tunneled portions are probably at $300+M/km.
The only change I'd argue (from what I remember around consultations I attended at the time) is that they really stretched to reach Tunney's Pasture. The argument was that they wanted to save a lot of people a single transfer from Bayview to Tunney's, given how many people worked there. In hindsight, saving Tunney's for Stage 2, might have given them enough to do a much better job with Stage 1. And not put off things like rebuilding St-Laurent or going with fully automated trains with enclosed stations (like the REM).
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